Name, first nameChristoph Tim SchneiderYear of birth1983eMailmail@christophtimschneider.deUniversityHKBField of Interest / research fieldCommunication Design / Visual CommunicationTitle of projectThe Tale of the Big Computer: A VisionAbstractWe live in a truly fortunate world: the perfect computer civilisation. Humanity is just one of evolution’s footnotes. Because human intelligence was too constrained to create a well-ordered society. After their invention computers gradually assumed control and took away from humans the agony of decision-making. But this symbiotic society has one weakness: human unpredictability. Consequently the age of symbiosis ended in a huge catastrophe. The global information network collapsed. Computers weWe live in a truly fortunate world: the perfect computer civilisation. Humanity is just one of evolution’s footnotes. Because human intelligence was too constrained to create a well-ordered society. After their invention computers gradually assumed control and took away from humans the agony of decision-making. But this symbiotic society has one weakness: human unpredictability. Consequently the age of symbiosis ended in a huge catastrophe. The global information network collapsed. Computers were destroyed, panic spread among the people whose population fell drastically. After a period of reconstruction a better society was successfully created, independent of humans. Computers are now able to exist without humans. The last humans are redundant, now just a source of instability in this perfect civilisation.

When the Swedish plasma physicist and Nobel prize winner Hannes Alfvén published his book “The Tale of the Big Computer: A Vision” in 1966 under the pseudonym Olof Johannesson, computer technology was still in its infancy, the internet as we know it today was unimaginable. Yet in the guise of a historian looking back from the future he portrays a world which is increasingly becoming our reality. The accompanying material from the historian’s archive takes the reader on a quest at the point where reality and fiction meet.TutorsKonrad Tobler, Sebastian Cremers